Companies Try to Make the First Day for New Hires More Fun

Johann Heller, left, said he was surprised by the fast pace of his first day at Rover.com, where he made some updates to the company's website.
Stuart Isett for The Wall Street Journal

By

Rachel Emma Silverman

May 28, 2013 7:58 p.m. ET

Why is the first day on the job often the worst?

New employees tend to be greeted with stacks of benefits paperwork, technology hassles and dull presentations about company culture.

But some companies—hoping to create a first impression that really counts—are turning to orientations that seem more collegiate than corporate, complete with co-worker networking sessions, time for new employees to tout their skills and even officewide scavenger hunts.

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It is the latest attempt by firms to make onboarding—the process of absorbing new hires and getting them up to speed—more effective.

A bad or underwhelming start in a new role may lead to higher rates of quitting because many workers decide whether to leave or stick with a company in the early months, studies show. The first few weeks on the job are "the first time the employee has the ability to look at a job from the inside," says David Earle, chief executive of Staffing.org, a workforce research and advisory company.

Morgan Hoogvelt, director of talent acquisition at Clear Channel Communications Inc. in San Antonio, says that the company until recently didn't have a formal onboarding process.

Employees would approach him with basic questions soon after joining the firm: What time should I be here? Where do I park? What's the dress code? Is it OK to bring my lunch? Now, he is trying to implement a more organized process, pairing new staffers with "peer coaches" available to answer questions before their official start date.

"There are only two days you really remember on the job—the first day and your last," says Mr. Hoogvelt.

In a 2011 survey of corporate onboarding practices by the Society for Human Resource Management, about half of respondents said that limited time and insufficient human-resources staffing prevented them from offering formal programs for new hires. Some 19% of firms lack onboarding programs entirely, according to the SHRM study.

Most orientations emphasize corporate values, culture and strengths. But a growing body of research suggests that encouraging newcomers to demonstrate what they bring to the company—rather than a lecture on the company mission—may lead to better retention and performance.

"When we can stress the personal identity of people, and let them bring more of themselves at work, they are more satisfied with their job and have better performance," says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who has studied onboarding.

Some firms do this by putting workers on the front lines on day one.

Dog-boarding site Rover.com has new developers make live updates on the firm's website on their first day of the job.

Scott Porad, Rover's head of product development, says he was inspired by research showing that tasks associated with employee dissatisfaction—such as paperwork and bureaucracy—characterized typical new-hire orientations.Meanwhile, autonomy, learning and feeling productive all contributed to employee satisfaction.

Software engineer Johann Heller, who started at Rover earlier this month, was surprised by the fast pace of his first day; his previous jobs had far more "procedural" orientations, he says.

Mr. Heller was quickly issued a new laptop and "by the end of the day I had pushed some changes" to the company's website, he says. "It helps you feel like you made an impact on day one." It also forces the company to have most technology and administrative logistics in place before the employee arrives.

Dr. Gino of Harvard, along with Dan Cable of London Business School and Bradley Staats of the University of North Carolina, have studied how personalized orientation programs can boost retention and performance.

In a study of 605 employees at the New Delhi, India, offices of Wipro BPO, a business process outsourcing firm and business of Wipro Ltd., some call-center workers went through an orientation that focused on their individual strengths. Managers, for example, asked newcomers to describe a time in their lives when they felt "born to act." Those workers were even given sweatshirts emblazoned with their names, and not the company's.

Six months later, those who went through the employee-centered orientation were up to 32% less likely to have quit than those who sat through a typical company-focused onboarding process.

And Bazaarvoice, a tech firm in Austin, Texas, sends incoming employees on a weeklong scavenger hunt designed to bring them up to speed on company culture and lingo.

Benefits paperwork does get done at some point; Facebook Inc., among others, sends new hires key documents to complete before their start date.

That frees employees to do other important things, such as getting to know colleagues. Rob Cross, a management professor at the University of Virginia, has found new workers stay on the job longer when they're plugged into a social group early on. He recommends that managers connect new workers with colleagues and mentors with complementary skills, instead of assuming ties will form naturally.

Google Inc., which onboarded some 5,000 new hires in 2012, has experimented with its orientation procedures to help new staffers, dubbed "Nooglers," make more social connections and get up to speed more quickly. For instance, the company has tested whether the size of an orientation group affected how new workers assimilate.

Google's finding: Workers who went through orientation in cohorts of about a dozen people felt more comfortable and created stronger social bonds than those put into larger groups. But the group size didn't seem to have a significant effect on productivity, Google found.

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